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New Zealand Government Open Source with Novell
quikflik writes "New Zealand Computerworld magazine reports an 'All-of-government' open source deal with Novell.
The deal allows government agencies access to Novell Open Source software and support - and probably some other Novell products too considering the Inland Revenue Department have been using them for a while. Still .. is an incumbant vendor always the best? If you were a government, which linux distribution would you choose?"
If I were a government looking for a software platform I would most definately choose Novell. You get the level of support that you need with the advantage that you are getting an open platform on which to work. If you have trouble with your Novell linux you can easily get Redhat in to take over, bring in consultants to help out or even set up a department to do it yourself.
But we all know that, right? Is anyone on Slashdot actually thinking that choosing SLES over, say RHEL or (god forbid) a custom Gentoo approach is a bad decision?
My personal opinion is that Novell / SuSE is a better approach than RedHat since Novell has a better desktop product (actually, a better range of desktop offerings) to go along with its server software.
I'm not "a government" but instead work for one.
When we buy general-purpose servers, we go for reasonable quality, good hardware replacement support services, and distribution-hardware compatibility partnerships, such as the Red Hat - HP one.
The question "what is it we really need to provide" which ultimately leads to "which distribution should we use" is not a trivial one. However, the one surefire way to botch things up is to put "we should use X" question before the "what do we want" question.
A general tone in the government IT is that a push towards Linux is good around the board for us customers because it changes the market landscape back to normal after Microsoft has tipped it over for a while. "Horses for courses" is a tried and tested way for humans to work together, and malignant monopolies can prevent and have prevented us from working together.
However, what we're really waiting for is for the established actors in the Linux market, such as Red Hat and Novell, to bring out real corporate desktop products with all associated support services. I'm not talking about the current workstation products, but instead of locked-down, managed desktop environments WITH the fringe benefit of X11, which means that we can add local applications on local application servers without having to install them on the desktops, and benefit from a more headquaters-controlled but still locally fixable environment.
We're seeing the Red Hat Network product being worked on, and ultimately the openness of Linux architecture will be a huge boon for citizen activists who can add efficiency to government directly by fixing software applications and creating better ones.
Vehicle registration software working slowly? You can fix it directly by optimizing the GUI libraries.
Having been working in an Redhat enterprise linux environment for so many years we have recently began to shift all servers over to novel. Since that time we have had less issues and the overall support from novel has been awesome to say the least. PLUS in our case it costs significantly less than the same Redhat licensing fees (redhat network etc). We have also several slackware and debian boxes doing other things. Go Novel, Say no to redhat.
Got a question about UNIX ask it here : Unix/xBSD Forum
the distro costs _NOTHING_, zero, zip, nada...
the deal is for tech support, migration, development of custom apps...
even if they go debian or slack or fedora... they'll still have to pay for tech support.
this "distro X is free, so is more bang for the buck" speech is what scares companies away from migrating to open plataforms. the ones who fell for this got severelly burned once they saw the cost of the support.
if you want to convince someone to migrate, be honest. say "the software is free, but related costs exists and they're as high as microsoft's one. what you really get for your cash is the freedom to choose vendor, the assurance that your data will still be available in 20 years, etc., etc., etc.."
What ? Me, worry ?
Does this mean that it's GNU/Zealand now?
[ducks]
This